Ostertag — A Place Vendome House of the Belle Epoque and Art Deco
Ostertag — A Place Vendome House of the Belle Epoque and Art Deco
An influential French jewellery firm active from the late nineteenth century to 1939, now collected at auction
Ostertag was a French jewellery house active in Paris on the Place Vendome and the rue de la Paix during the late nineteenth century and the first four decades of the twentieth, producing fine jewellery in the Art Nouveau and Art Deco idioms before closing at the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939. The firm operated alongside the larger Place Vendome houses — Cartier, Boucheron, Van Cleef & Arpels, Mauboussin — and produced work that competed at the same level for an overlapping clientele. Surviving Ostertag pieces are now collected at auction and are represented in the holdings of the Victoria and Albert Museum and other major decorative-arts collections.
The firm
Ostertag was founded by Arnold Ostertag, a Franco-Alsatian jeweller who established his Paris business in the late nineteenth century. The firm built its reputation through Belle Epoque pieces in the garland style, transitioned through the Art Nouveau period, and produced its best-known work during the Art Deco years of the 1920s and 1930s. The house operated from premises on the Place Vendome and was one of the recognised second-tier Parisian houses behind the major maisons, with a smaller production but with comparable craftsmanship and material standards in its top pieces.
Ostertag's clientele included American and European wealth of the interwar period, with documented commissions for Hollywood actors, European royalty, and South American clients. The firm exhibited at the 1925 Exposition Internationale des Arts Decoratifs et Industriels Modernes in Paris, the event that gave Art Deco its name, and the pieces shown at that exhibition established the firm's reputation as one of the genuinely creative houses of the period.
Style
Ostertag's Art Deco production is characterised by geometric platinum-and-diamond pieces, by the use of coloured-stone inlays in the Indian-influenced tutti-frutti style, by lacquered Chinese-influenced motifs, and by combinations of jade, onyx, coral, and lapis lazuli with diamond and platinum that align with the broader Art Deco taste. The firm's work shows technical refinement comparable to the larger houses — calibre-cut coloured stones, millegrain edges, hand-piercing, and integrated cabochon-and-faceted-stone compositions — and the surviving pieces are valued today for both their craftsmanship and their relatively limited surviving production.
Ostertag also produced figurative jewellery, including animal brooches, clip pendants, and ornamental bracelets that reflect the broader 1930s vocabulary. The firm's flacon, vanity case, and minaudiere production parallels Cartier's and Van Cleef & Arpels's work in those categories.
Closure and afterlife
The Ostertag firm closed in 1939, at the outbreak of the Second World War, and did not reopen after 1945. The closure was permanent, and the firm has not been revived under its name. Surviving stock and archival drawings have appeared in the trade in subsequent decades, and Ostertag pieces appear at auction at Christie's, Sotheby's, Bonhams, and the major specialist sales of period jewellery.
Pricing for Ostertag at auction reflects the firm's status as a recognised but not headline house. Top Art Deco pieces have realised five- and six-figure prices in major sales; ordinary pieces trade in the range of comparable second-tier French Art Deco. The firm's signature is a research point in dating and attribution work.
In the trade
Ostertag is a name to recognise rather than chase. Buyers of Art Deco jewellery should expect Ostertag pieces in any major period collection but should not expect them at the volumes seen with the larger maisons. The firm's pieces are reliably good craftsmanship of the period and reliably indicative of a serious clientele in the interwar years. See also Cartier, Boucheron, Mauboussin, Place Vendome.